Half-Life 2 comes to Nvidia’s Shield portable game machine

Nvidia announced today that Valve has made Half-Life 2 available on its Shield portable gaming machine.

That may not sound like a system-selling announcement, but it is interesting since you can bet that Valve and Nvidia must be in conversations about doing a SteamOS version of the Shield at some point in the future. This announcement suggests that Nvidia and Valve are closely aligned.

Valve is creating the SteamOS and Steam Machine platform that other device makers can use to build high-end gaming machines for launch this fall. Nvidia’s $200 Shield device is based on Android, so players can download Half-Life 2 from the Google Play store. Nvidia previously announced that Portal would be available on the Shield via Google Play.

More than 300 Android games are now available on Shield. Nvidia hasn’t said how many machines it has sold, and that probably means that it’s not worth bragging about.

“Nvidia has done a remarkable job bringing both Half-Life 2 and Portal to Shield,” said Doug Lombardi, the vice president of marketing at Valve, in a statement. “We’re playing both games here on our Shields and fans of both franchises can expect the same gameplay they’ve come to love on the PC.”

Nvidia says that it will deliver a PC-like native experience for Half-Life 2 on Android.

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Nvidia specializes in the manufacture of graphics-processor technologies for workstations, desktop computers, and mobile devices. The company, based in Santa Clara, California, is a major supplier of integrated circuits used for person... read more »